The Real Reason Male CEOs Commit To Diversity

Like many of my colleagues in the women’s leadership space, I believed that the business case for having more women in leadership roles was a defining moment. With this data, I was encouraged that male CEOs would finally wake up and get that diversity is not a “nice to have” initiative, but one that will improve the performance of their organization.

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But what we have experienced is that male CEOs have not paid much attention to this information, and as time has passed, we have seen little progress in moving more women to the C-suite. What is the missing piece? If it’s not the business case, what will get the attention of CEOs?

To get the answers, I turned to Jeffery Tobias Halter, President of YWomen, a strategic consulting company focused on engaging men in women’s leadership advancement, and a speaker at the upcoming Simmons Leadership Conference.

Bonnie Marcus: Jeffery, if the business case for women’s leadership doesn’t work to engage male CEOs, what does it take?

Jeffery Tobias Halter: What I’m finding is that the men who are really choosing to do this work are the fathers of daughters. These men realize that they have a responsibility. The conversations I have with these CEOs are 80 percent head and 20 percent heart. The key is to understand the overwhelming data to get comfortable overcoming male cultural norms. That’s the head piece. And that’s why you need conversational knowledge of why this is important. The heart piece, however, is the 20 percent that moves men to advocacy, and that’s the personal connection.

Men don’t consciously conspire to hold women back. We’re not that mean. We’re not that manipulative. We have never made the connection. My peer group and I lead compartmentalized lives. I’m a young boomer. We raised strong women. And whether it was soccer or art or dance, we supported our daughters. We made sure they went to a great school, got a good degree. And when they walk out the door and they make 78 cents to my son, we choose to do nothing. Because we never made the connection. If I’m not advocating for gender equity and pay equity, I’m actually letting my daughter down, one of the most important people in my life. That’s the heart piece.

BM: For all these years, I thought, “The data speaks for itself.”

JTH: Yes, but men have to be actively engaged. My approach on this is to approach what I call “ready now” men; they are fathers of daughters. And their daughters are coming home and say, “Dad, don’t you control like 50,000 people? What are you doing for women?” And this is a connection that they have never made or been asked. And it’s how men have an epiphany in this space. They realize they have a responsibility.

I run a program called Male Engagement Circles. And literally the first thing I train men to do is to tell their story about why this is important to them. Because there are a lot of cultural norms and they’re going to have to stand up to other men and talk about why they’re doing this women’s thing. The second thing is to get a women’s cultural coach. That’s a female colleague that you can have an open honest dialogue with. And I want you to ask them one question: “Talk to me about being a woman working in this company.” And then shut up and listen. Listen for 10 or 15 minutes until she comes to a natural break point. Then say, “And what else?” Don’t defend. Don’t say, “Oh, that’s the program. That’s a policy.” Just shut up and listen. Then do it a third time and in that last 30 minutes, you’re going to hear root cause issues you had no idea existed in your company. And you as a leader have a responsibility to act on those. But most men don’t even want to have the conversation.

BM: Why are these conversations difficult for most male CEOs?

JTH: There’s a complicating factor here. Most men are scared to death to have a conversation around gender differences. HR and legal have scared us to think that we may say or do the wrong thing. Or our cultural norms are, “I see no value in having this conversation.” And by the way, as a white male, I can have a very long, healthy career without ever choosing to do this work. So it’s just as easy for me not to engage in this conversation. But that’s not what great leaders do.

Going back to 2008, everybody’s got three times the amount of work to do. This is why you need an operational strategy that organizations can approach in an integrated manner. And the way to frame that up is really, “How do leaders in the organization connect this back to the everyday business growing revenue, improving operating profit, and enhancing company reputation?” and then, “How do you begin to align internal functions?” Most organizations use “diversity” or “women” interchangeably. It’s seen as an HR initiative. But there are two key functional areas that often aren’t a part of the message. One is Sales and Marketing, which is if you’re in B2C, this is where the brain trust is around all the insights and everything that goes on in the organization. And the other is everything from operations, supply chain, and any P&L function within the organization. Marketing and Sales represent the driver of revenue, P&L responsibility represents the building block of who gets to the C-suite. And so engaging the field and middle management, along with Sales and Marketing, I believe is the big missing piece that most organizations see as an HR-driven initiative when in fact, HR is an enabler. But the business needs to own it.

BM: If I hear you correctly, you are saying that the CEOs who get the business case, often don’t know how to operationalize it? That many of these programs are the responsibility of HR?

JTH: Yes. What you find in most organizations is that HR programs and prophecies are incredibly subjective and so performance management in most companies is broken. And selection is broken. And succession planning is not transparent. And so it’s the kind of thing that leaders don’t have the time to understand. And the big problem is that programs don’t drive progress. It’s one of the reasons we’ve been at this for 20 years and we haven’t changed the numbers at all. Because it’s not a programmatic problem. It’s an organizational culture change initiative.

When I go in front of senior leadership teams and say, “Do you really want to retain and advance women?” and they say, “Yes.” I say, “It’s as simple as this: Ask them what they want and give it to them.” It’s that simple and that hard because it flies in the face of every cultural and programmatic and policy issue you have. But it’s the only way you’re going to keep talent today. And if you’ve invested 3 to 5 years or maybe 10 years in a women or minority or quite frankly, even an old white guy, you’ve got to change the way you’re doing business today or you’re going to lose and your competition is going to win.